Judge Neil Gorsuch (right) meets Chuck Schumer (D-NY), in February. This story is part of a group of stories called Outside contributors' opinions and analysis of the most important issues in politics, science, and culture. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer appears to have secured support from 40…

The U.S. Supreme Court receives thousands of appeals from the nation’s lower courts each year. It declines to hear almost all of them. But for Justice Clarence Thomas, one of those rejected cases earlier this month gave him the chance to challenge a widely criticized police practice: civil…

Shutterstock The jury is still out on whether Team Trump colluded with Russian operatives during last year’s presidential campaign—the subject of an extensive FBI investigation. But the evidence is overwhelming that the Trump White House is colluding every day with the Fox News Channel , with Donald…

Negotiations over a Republican health care plan to replace Obamacare appear to have reignited with great fervor this week, with the White House and the conservative House Freedom Caucus in talks about a new health care plan. The Washington Examiner gives a good sense of where the negotiations are —…

Economic View Credit... Chris Koehler Despite an eight-day losing streak that ended on Tuesday, the stock market has generally been buoyant in the opening weeks of the Trump administration. The bullish mood could be a self-fulfilling prophecy and lead to continuing gains for a while. Yet important…

President Trump loves Fox & Friends . At 6:24 a.m. on Monday, Trump gushed on Twitter about the “amazing reporting” on the morning talk show. A week earlier he instructed the nation to “watch @foxandfriends now” for their exemplary Russia coverage. He tweeted about the program, hosted by Steve…

Demonstrators chant during a protest against Neil Gorsuch outside the Supreme Court on March 29, 2017. (Reuters / Aaron P. Bernstein) The Senate Judiciary Committee approved Neil Gorsuch’s nomination in an 11-to-9 party-line vote today. But 41 Senate Democrats have now pledged to oppose Gorsuch ,…

The United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting in January between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladi­mir Putin as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump, according to U.S.,…

When Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, touched down in Iraq on Monday, his visit to the critical Middle East country preceded more traditional trips by either the president’s secretary of state or his national security adviser. Kushner’s unusual journey to Baghdad —…

Former national security adviser Susan Rice. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Former National Security Adviser Susan Rice reportedly tried to learn the identities of officials on President Donald Trump's transition team whose conversations with foreign officials were incidentally collected during…

Investigators saw a pattern behind requests from Susan Rice. Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images White House lawyers last month learned that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw…

Every day seems to bring fresh news in the Kremlin-gate scandal about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Just a few highlights from the past week: —CBS News reports that the FBI is investigating whether “Trump campaign representatives had a role in helping Russian…

Ross Douthat Trump Needs a Brain President Donald Trump at The White House on Friday. Credit... Eric Thayer for The New York Times THE series of columns I’ve been writing lately, floating implausible proposals for an ideologically unstable age, has been a useful way of avoiding the depressing…

President Trump entered his 11th week in office Friday in crisis mode, his governing agenda at risk of being subsumed by escalating questions about the White House’s conduct in the Russia probe — which the president called a “witch hunt.” Trump and his senior aides spent much of the day on the…

Getty Lisa Rab is a journalist in Charlotte, N.C. Her work has appeared in Mother Jones and The Village Voice , among other outlets. Reach her at lisayrab@gmail.com. In the fall of 2002, just over a year after the 9/11 attacks, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft summoned a group of federal…

Whatever plan Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin develops, it will be Donald Trump’s third tax blueprint in less than a year. | AP Photo The Trump White House is already mapping out a major, historic overhaul of the tax code, just one week after the stunning collapse of its Obamacare repeal bill.…

Sen. Cory Gardner listens as Sen. Michael Bennet introduces Supreme Court Justice nominee Neil Gorsuch and his wife, Marie Louise, during opening statements at Gorsuch's confirmation March 20 on Capitol Hill. | AP Photo Michael Bennet is in a bind. The centrist Coloradan is under siege like no other…

Freedom Caucus chairman Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., talks about health care earlier this month and conservatives’ opposition to the health care bill proposed by GOP leadership and the White House. Mark Wilson/Getty Images Since the Republican health care bill died recently, President Trump has been…

Last month, President Trump issued a long-promised executive order dismantling President Obama’s restrictions on carbon pollution — part of his broader assault on Obama’s environmental legacy. Today, the People’s Climate March is happening in DC — and in sister rallies around the world. So it’s a…

Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images Senior Trump adviser Jared Kushner declared in an interview last weekend at his West Wing office: “We should have excellence in government. ... The government should be run like a great American company. Our hope is that we can achieve successes and efficiencies…

Colbert has had it, officially. CBS The night of the presidential election marked a turning point for The Late Show W ith Stephen Colbert — but not because of anything that happened on The Late Show W ith Stephen Colbert . As the election results rolled in on November 8, Colbert was hosting a live…

How’s everyone feeling tonight?? NBC The ongoing confusion of Donald Trump’s first months as president has presented a unique challenge to anyone who mines the news for comedy, especially now that Trump can’t be written off — like he was when he officially announced his candidacy in June 2015 — as a…

Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images Bullshitting is easy, but governing is hard: Trump’s bluster and bombast, so effective on the campaign trail, has backfired spectacularly in office. As Vox’s Ezra Klein noted this week, Trump is failing on almost every front. His health care bill died — killed by…

“Do you think low-income Americans pay too much, too little, or a fair amount in taxes?” This question was part of a tax quiz we published in February. About 7,000 of you answered four knowledge questions, as well as questions about how fair you thought taxes were. And we told you we'd report back…

US Rep. Steve King (R-IA) — center — caused controversy with a tweet supporting Geert Wilders (left), a member of parliament in the Netherlands: “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” Brendan Smialowski / Getty This story is part of a group of stories called Outside…

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) sponsored the legislation to roll back FCC privacy rules. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images This story is part of a group of stories called Where technology and economics collide In a party-line 215 to 205 vote, the House of Representatives has approved legislation…

Next week, Chinese President Xi Jinping will travel to the United States to meet Donald Trump for the first time. But according to Gideon Rachman, the chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times , power is flowing in the opposite direction. Rachman is far from the first analyst to…

NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty The Trump White House is flailing for many reasons. One problem is general incompetence and bad management. Another is the lack of unity in the Republican Party. Another is Trump’s own tendency to make unforced errors. And there are the looming investigations. But it’s…

Flynn. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images) “General Flynn certainly has a story to tell, and he very much wants to tell it.” So begins a Thursday statement from former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s attorney, Robert Kelner, about his client’s willingness to testify before the House and Senate…

Paul Ryan explains the Republican plan to replace the Affordable Care Act in March, 2017 in Washington, DC. Win McNamee/Getty Images Sherri Underwood reluctantly cast her vote for Donald Trump in November. But as her health insurance premiums continued to rise, reaching a price higher than her…

Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images House Speaker Paul Ryan on Friday regarding repeal: "We’re going to be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable future." Ryan today: Maybe not. "The way I would describe the meeting we just had with our members is we are going to work together and listen together…

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images Jared Kushner has been tasked with helping the federal government solve some of America’s most vexing public policy crises — from streamlining Veterans Affairs to fixing the opioid epidemic — by bringing the acumen of the business world to the White House. On…

House Speaker Paul Ryan. AP It's hard to decide which would be the more politically damaging outcome for Republican politicians: passing the American Health Care Act, and therefore owning the premium increases and coverage losses it would cause; or not passing the bill, and therefore failing to do…

Donald Trump talks to reporters in the 'Spin Alley' after the first prime-time presidential debate in August. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) There are many ways to cover politics—data, field reporting, expert analysis—but all of them require a sense of not just what to seek and include, but…

Representative Devin Nunes of California, a Republican and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, arrived for a meeting Tuesday on Capitol Hill. Credit... Doug Mills/The New York Times WASHINGTON — A pair of White House officials helped provide Representative Devin Nunes of California, a…

Digital security and its discontents—from Hillary Clinton’s emails to ransomware to Tor hacks—is in many ways one of the chief concerns of the contemporary FBI. So it makes sense that the bureau’s director, James Comey, would dip his toe into the digital torrent with a Twitter account. It also makes…

After more than two months in office, America’s new president, Republican Donald Trump, got a grade of F from 1 in 3 voters, according to a new McClatchy-Marist Poll. By contrast, the same number graded predecessor Democrat Barack Obama’s performance a B as he approached his 100th day in office.…

The House Freedom Caucus laid out two demands on Thursday for a health care bill its members would support: ending Obamacare’s essential health benefits and its “community rating” provisions. These sound wonky, but make no mistake: Axing these two provisions would decimate Obamacare and its…

There was more than a little irony in President Trump’s tweeted demand Wednesday that the hard-line conservative faction in the House that stymied him on health care “get on the team, & fast. We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018!” As the president should understand better than most, partisan politics…

On my first day of work as the editor in chief of the New York Observer, which had been acquired five years earlier by Jared Kushner, now the son-in-law and senior adviser to President Trump, I inherited an office and a desktop computer, both in fine but used condition. The computer was a…